Imagine you’re in a UX research job interview. The interviewer asks, “Can you please describe your research process?”. I might start with, “I work with my product stakeholders to identify the most critical areas where we have assumptions or questions…”. This is a fine answer, and it’s the right answer most of the time. However, it’s not the only answer, especially if you want to make a strategic impact.

There is a time and a place to go rogue and develop research independently of stakeholders in your organization. It goes against conventional wisdom, but it’s one of the most impactful things you can do as a UX researcher.

Why we align

As UX researchers, we don’t really “own” anything in the product. We exert our value in the business through influence rather than delivering tangible code, pixels, algorithms, etc. Research isn’t on the hook for final outcome metrics like user growth or revenue. We are on the hook for influencing, and it’s our reason for being on the product team. This influence is the critical kind of impact researchers are graded on.

One way to help ensure impact ahead of a project is to align with stakeholders on what problem they need to learn about. It fits the work neatly into a pre-packaged domain, the problem space already carved out for the insights to fill. This is how most research work should be done. Research is part of a team and it’s easy (especially for juniors) to strike out on a fact finding mission no one has a need to learn about.

Once a researcher gathers the data and crafts the insights, they need to come back to the team and convince them to act. Alignment is useful but it’s not worth much if a researcher doesn’t have a “seat at the table” to influence other stakeholders who have the power and responsibility of deciding the roadmap, and this is a common occurrence. Researchers typically have very little final decision-making power, as opposed to someone like a product manager or executive leader. As actors in a product team move further away from decision-making power, the seat at the table becomes more of an active challenge to achieve.

Who has a seat at the table

This is the part where I issue a robust caveat, the following is based on my personal experiences and those of people I’ve talked to in the fields of UX research and data science. It won’t fit perfectly across all teams or orgs. 

What is the difference between UX research and data science (DS), the other core insights function of a product team? There are many differences, but the first one that comes to mind typically is the focus of DS on log data and business-level metrics. UX research complements this domain with insights that focus on things that cannot be captured in log data, like user attitudes and intent.

The most important difference for our topic today is cultural. As UX researchers, we often yearn for the buy-in that DS receives from its stakeholders by default. Product managers rely on DS for experimental analyses and key metric measurement. Teams need the data to move forward. Their influence necessitates their seat at the table. UX researchers could only wish for such a perfect situation, right? The more I’ve gotten to know my DS colleagues, the more often I’ve heard from them that UX researchers have something DS yearns for in turn. In other words, the grass is always greener.

The strong buy-in and alignment that DS has with product teams can also be a burden. Data scientists are so relied upon that they can get roped into tactical work like creating dashboards or focusing within a narrow scope of moving a product pillar’s metrics. The impact is there — these things are hugely important for the business. But this naturally narrows the scope of work a DS can take on. In fact, when Data Science says they don’t have a seat at the table, it’s typically about being too tightly scoped rather than needing to have an impact at all. 

When UX research is fighting for a seat at the table, this normally is about the ability to have any influence in the first place. While challenging, this is part of a natural trade-off. An insights role can have easier buy-in with a more tethered scope or a bigger fight for buy-in with freedom to pursue a broader scope of work. This means that UX research has a default posture to conduct more exploratory projects. 

The value of not having a seat at the table

The primary and most visible value of UX research is de-risking business decisions. Beyond the face value, UX research has an important cultural value in a product team: the freedom from immediate impact. I’ve just talked about how this creates a burden to achieve a seat at the table, but it also comes with strengths that enable UX research to deliver work other teammates across insights functions cannot typically deliver.

The narrow, tethered scope of highly embedded DS teams leads to a focus on problems that only cover a local maximum. The problems are the biggest ones we can already see, but they fail to account for a global maximum: a highly improved state that may be beyond the bounds of a product team’s scope. UX research, unbounded by as many executional requirements, can make room to conduct work that no one is asking for.

I call these domains strategic impact and tactical impact spaces. Generative work is prototypical here, but certainly not exclusive. Evaluative work can also help organizations better assess a strategic impact space, as long as it’s sufficiently large in scope. (See my previous post on defining strategic research for a deeper dive on this topic.)

Projects in the strategic impact space don’t aim to immediately change a top line metric next month or fix a bug or refine a user flow (sometimes they do by chance). There is no strict way to categorize this research, but you are likely to see it show up in your organization in a couple ways:

• Help a company see around corners.
  • Businesses take their competitive threats very seriously, but what about the ones they aren’t aware of? Looking at existing internal data or narrowly scoped research is unlikely to uncover the unknown threats.
  • Even if no competitive threat exists, work looking to make a strategic impact can uncover brand new lines of business or work.
• Create a shared understanding.
  • This sounds simple, but these insights are like a human body’s fascia, a connective tissue in a single layer that supports all joints, organs, and bones together. This shared understanding is like fascia in that it doesn’t serve a singular function like an organ or bone (or feature or algorithm), but ensures a cohesive function across an entire company.
  • Success here looks like your CEO casually using your segments in a company call or product teams you have never worked with relying on your findings without citing you at all because “Everyone just knows this is true”. You’ve embedded new knowledge in a way that naturally supports everyone’s work.

This impact is hard to measure and often leaves your efforts unsung because it feels so intuitive and naturalistic to your stakeholders. For this reason, it requires a low ego and a fierce determination to keep tackling. Ultimately, it’s worth it because it leads to the best outcomes for the organization. (And I happen to think it’s one of the more fun kinds of research projects). 

Embracing the right amount of freedom

Knowing we have this freedom/burden of exploring the strategic impact space, we can’t simply live in it all the time as researchers. There is a useful balance to take on across both spaces.

I use a dual track approach every time I plan my work. I take on some strategic work that moves at a slower pace and a few tactical projects that target things stakeholders are specifically asking for. Each of these help drive the product forward at different layers. This will vary by role due to seniority, being horizontal/embedded, product lifecycle, etc.

Does this dual track approach really work in practice? In my experience, absolutely. Check out my talk from the past Quant UX Con 2025 that goes into detail about work I did that no one was asking for and the impact it led to.

Making strategic impact research successful

To get started, it’s important to critically assess what your company doesn’t already know, even if no product stakeholders have mentioned it. You must use your unique perspective as a researcher to see the gaps. Then, have the courage to plan without consulting every stakeholder, or perhaps even any of them.

You also must truly address a large scope. It’s okay, and perhaps encouraging, if you can’t nail down the main person who would act on your findings. This means you’re thinking big.

Once planned, you need to do really good work. You can’t cut corners in execution, analysis, or sense-making. You’ll be left with so-so insights. Jess Holbrook called this “banal realism” in his post on AI research slop, but you find the same thing by doing low quality, human-crafted research as well. You need to dive deep or you’ll be left with things that are technically true, but not novel or influential.

Lastly, you must be patient and persistent. It’s rare that this work fully makes its impact right away. It will take time. You went rogue and then have to spend time on reentry. You must believe in your work and continue to make sure the insights find their way into the right hands, the right calls, the right documents, as time moves on far past when you did the research. When done, you and your organization will reap the benefits for years to come.

Not every UX research team has the maturity or psychological safety to do this, but it’s why one thing I’ve always looked for in a team is how much freedom I’ll have to take big swings.

Wrap up

In an ideal world, UX research would have a seat at the table of product decision-making. In 2025 (and likely for decades to come), that is not the world we live in as UX researchers. This is a burden and challenge to making an impact on the organization we work in. However, this burden in one area comes with a lightness in another. We are less tethered than other insights functions from thinking big and doing truly strategic work. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to secure our seat at the table. It does mean we should reflect on what this allows our function to accomplish more easily¹.

The current anxiety-ridden state of our industry may naturally lead us to focus more tactically and cling to immediate impact (for good reason). Still, strategic work that focuses on the global maximum has multiple benefits. It benefits organizational outcomes to understand our users and products better at a fundamental level. It also benefits researchers to be able to draw on impact for years from one well-executed, evergreen research project. I would encourage UX research individual contributors to think big, and strategically when we can, and encourage managers to make space for individual contributors to do so. 

1. Again, this is a generalization. Some UX research teams are tightly scoped into executional work. Many DS teams do broad and strategic projects. Part of my thinking here also stems from the fact that UX research uniquely spends so much time in the operationalization stage of core concepts. ↩︎